The infrastructure needs of the United States have evolved rapidly over the past 60 years. Even as the nation embarked to build a comprehensive physical infrastructure of interstate highways to support the post war manufacturing economy, the transportation needs of America were evolving. With this initiative to build highways, the American worker had more choices of communities in which to live while being able to commute to centrally located workplaces (e.g., single-location workplaces) within a given radius.
However, this transportation infrastructure invited growth without a full understanding of the impact. Despite the fact that road construction and public transportation initiatives expanded rapidly, traffic issues in the United States continued to grow at a significant rate. The resulting sprawl and congestion require billions of gallons of gasoline per year. The major costs of these traffic issues include 1) greater reliance on gasoline, 2) greater expense of building and maintaining roads, 3) lost productivity of workers who spend increasingly more time in their cars and less at work, and 4) air pollution and air quality concerns. By some estimates, the lost productivity and wasted fuel due to these factors is over $100 million per day.
The growing impact of congestion in U.S. transportation models can serve to undermine the competitive posture of the U.S. worker and create an overall drag on the economy. Globalization is changing the landscape of the job market, as advances in technology and the opening of markets have resulted in the movement of certain jobs overseas.
However, information technologies and architectures that underlie today's internet and mobile communication services were spawned during this same period. These advances fostered a revolution in electronics and communications, and have allowed information to be processed and to flow with ever increasing speed and lower costs. Over the past several decades, there has been a decided shift in the U.S. labor force from manufacturing, where the tools of production are brought to one physical location, to a knowledge based workforce. While this information revolution has allowed certain jobs to flow overseas, there are significant opportunities to use this technology to solve challenges at home.
In fact, Federal and State laws and regulations have directed agencies to support increasing numbers of remote workers. But agencies have in many instances not been able to meet these requirements. There are many reasons behind this fact: difficulty of IT support, lack of critical broadband services, challenges with security issues, limited management oversight, and lack of social interaction. While technology companies have developed capabilities to support remote work, a comprehensive distributed architecture response to the congestion problem has not yet been implemented.
In addition to issues related to congestion, a single (or centralized) location model can present other problems. For example, in the event of a natural or manmade disaster, there are evacuation complexities and fewer network redundancies in a centralized model. There is, therefore, a need for additional telework alternatives to address congestion problems while providing employees and managers a range tools to improve productivity, quality of life, and continuity of operations (for the organization, and its network).